Philosophy
Dussel presents political power as collective capacity that institutions may serve, distort or turn against the people.
Power goes bad at the moment those holding office believe it comes from themselves or their institution, rather than from the community they serve. Dussel calls this the fetishism of power: officials treat their own authority as the source, not as something on loan. The book presents this as the root corruption from which the others follow.
On Dussel's account, corrupted power is a double failure. Rulers who see themselves as the sovereign center are corrupted. So is the community that consents to become servile instead of acting to build its own institutions and principles.
No single part makes up the political: not elections, not institutions, not principles, not actions. It is all of them working together, the way a house is not only its door, wall, or roof. Reducing politics to any one piece misses what it is.
A political field can be studied as an abstract system, but in reality it is always crossed by people. Each of them has a will and some measure of power, and those wills are shaped by the particular settings they act within. There are no systems without subjects acting inside them.
Any political struggle waged for one party's own interests counts as corruption, whether that party is a single dictator, a class, an elite, or a network of inherited deals. The book holds that politics is legitimate only when it serves the whole community.
Dussel argues that a political project must criticize, and reject as unsustainable, any system, action, or institution whose harms fall on oppressed or excluded people. The test of an order is the damage borne by those it leaves out.
Because legitimate power originates in the community, the remedy for corrupted rule is for the people to reclaim sovereignty, not to find a better ruler. The book weighs reform and revolution as ways of transforming power so that it again serves those it comes from.